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Why does it take a year for a book to go from a draft
to bookstore shelves? Is it to build anticipation?
Because publishers are modern-day Neanderthals, trying to
make e-books by rubbing sticks together? Because authors
are so precious?

The correct answer is: yes! In more detail, it’s because this*:

MONTH 1

The editor and the author kick things off
by exchanging emails about how happy they are to be
working with one another. The editor prepares an EDIT LETTER,
which is a document describing how fantastic the
book is, and how even more fantasticer it would be if
the following thirty or so issues were addressed.
I put EDIT LETTER in caps because it’s very important.
The author considers this. There is some back and forth
over any parts of the EDIT LETTER that the author requires
more clarification on to fully understand what
kind of universe the editor must be living in to say such
a thing.

MONTHS 2-4

The author rewrites. How long this takes
depends on how much rewriting is required, and how depressed
the author gets. All books have been through
at least a couple author-driven drafts before they’re picked up by
a publisher, but obviously another pass is needed,
because why else editors. An editor who says, “Fine as is!”
might as well go panhandle.

Also, books at this stage really do need rewriting.

In my case, I did a lot of rewriting for my editor on
Company, and the publication process took 22 months.
I didn’t do much on Syrup, and it took nine.
So there is possibly a causal link there.

The art department begins fooling around with cover ideas,
under strict instructions to not share them with anybody,
especially authors.

MONTHS 5-6

The editor approves the rewritten draft and
shares it internally with salespeople, the art department,
and unrelated editors’ assistants. I’m not sure why assistants; I
just know every editorial assistant I’ve ever met has
read all my books.

The editor and author begin seeking people to provide a
blurb/cover quote. The first edition can’t
have actual reviews on the cover, because those
will be received too late. But you need someone
to say “MAGNIFICENT… STUNNING,” so you have to hit up a
fellow author.

The copyeditor prints out the new draft
and scrawls arcane markings on it by the light of tallow
candles using quills.
This ensures the book can no longer be shared electronically, and
all subsequent changes must be done by hand. This five-hundred-page
monstrosity is photocopied and e-mailed to the author.
Sorry, that was a typo. I mean mailed. You know. Mailed. When
they physically transport something. The author
reads this by light of a virgin moon, which is the only time the
unicorn ink becomes visible, and accepts some changes while giving
others a jolly good
stet. This can be a difficult
time for the author, who must defend grammatical errors
as stylistic choices in order to not look stupid.

The editor emails the author a scan of the finished cover art, saying,
“Everyone here loves this!” The author may object to aspects of
it, if he is an ungrateful asshole who thinks he knows how to
publish books better than a, you know, publisher.

The book’s layouts are developed: the internal artwork, including the
fonts, spacing, and style of chapter headings.

Publicity plans are developed, and final-ish decisions made on things
like price and publication dates.

MONTHS 7-8

The manuscript is transformed into a galley, which is the
final, copyedited version embedded in the layouts. When I say
“transformed,” I mean someone sits down with the five-hundred-page
copyedited manuscript, which by now has
been scrawled on by at least two and probably four different people,
with additional pages inserted here and there, and some of the changes
stetted and then destetted and maybe redesteted again,
some of which are impossible to read because I had to use a green pencil to
signify which changes were mine and I couldn’t find a sharpener and I was trying to squeeze
between the printed lines and thought I had enough room but didn’t.
This person types all that out. I have never met them,
because, I assume, they are kept in a basement and fed raw fish.

The author is sent galleys of forthcoming books by authors who agreed
to consider giving a blurb, in case he wishes to reciprocate,
while maintaining artistic integrity.

The Advanced Reader Copies are produced, which are like galleys,
but one step closer to the finished version. They’re for
reviewers and various promotions (a lot of Machine Man
ARCs were given out at Comic Con last year), and are essentially the finished
book, minus any late editorial changes, printed on cheap paper,
and possibly with different cover art.

The author reads the latest galley/ARC and notices several horrendous
errors that somehow escaped previous notice. He writes in with
corrections.

The audio version is developed.

The author corresponds with translators attached to various foreign
publishers, who want explanations for odd word choices. These will
probably be published many months or even years later, and look
super exotic.

MONTHS 9-10

The publisher pitches its quarterly list to large bookstore chains
and buyers. I believe they actually sit down in a room, and the editor or
marketing manager or whoever says, “Now THIS is a title we’re very
excited about, it’s OH GOD PLEASE BUY ME by Max Barry,” and they
have a little discussion about the author’s sales record and whether
people are really interested in that kind of book any more, so
that the bookstore chain/buyer can decide how many copies to stock.
If they choose a low number, the book is essentially dead, because
no-one will see it, and the publisher will scale back its marketing
plans, because why spend money promoting a book no-one knows
about. But if it’s a high number, there will
be renewed excitement and high-fives and a little extra marketing
budget for things like co-op (payment to bookstores for
favorable shelf placement). The author can tell which it is because
if it is a low number, the publisher won’t tell him.

Thanks to the
amazing new website
Random House has for its authors, I know they call this process
“working with the accounts on an ongoing basis to estimate initial
purchase quantities.”

The ARCs go out to newspapers, blogs, magazines, and anyone else who
wants a copy and has an audience of more than three people.
Interview and feature requests begin to come in and are scheduled
by the publicity department. Early reviews come in and are
forwarded to the author, unless they’re bad.

An e-book version is developed via a process involving priests and goats’
blood. Not really. It’s really done by re-typing the entire
book from the finished, typeset manuscript. Nah, I’m still kidding.
They take the last electronic document and just try to reimplement
all the manual changes made since then by hand. You can decide which of those
it is.

Due to piracy concerns, the e-book is closely guarded, so often cannot
be reviewed by the author. Instead it is
distributed to anyone with a blog and a
netgalley.com account.

MONTHS 11-13

More reviews come in, and early interviews/profiles
are conducted. The author, who has spent the last two years alone with a keyboard,
begins spending large parts of each day talking or writing about himself,
sowing the seeds for future personality disorders.

The publisher does whatever it is that needs to be done to ensure
that tens of thousands of physical copies end up in the right place at the
right time. I assume that’s something.

The book is published! The author catches the bus to the nearest bookstore
to discover they’re not stocking it. Calls to agent ensue.
The author may go on tour, which could involve dozens of cities over
many weeks, or just popping into local bookstore and
plaintively offering to sign copies, if they have some, like
out the back or whatever.

During a book reading, the author notices a horrendous error that
somehow escaped the editorial process.

The author wakes three-hourly to check his Amazon.com sales ranking.

And that’s about it.

* Note: Blog may represent one-sided author’s view
of a process he actually knows little about, with gaps in knowledge
filled with speculation and lies.

My fifth novel will be out in mid-2013. If you’re wondering
how I manage this breakneck pace, with Machine Man
gracing the shelves only last year, it’s because I
haven’t been updating my web site or going on Twitter or
Facebook. It’s amazing how much time that leaves. Also, I broke
my usual pattern of following good novels with
unpublishable ones. It’s a bold new strategy but I’m optimistic
that it might just work out.

The new book is Lexicon. If you’re the kind of
person who doesn’t want to know anything more, because you
have already decided to read it and want your experience to be
untainted by any hint of a spoiler, then (a) thank
you, (b) I am right there with you, and (c) you may skip
ahead to the next paragraph. For everyone else, it is about
a secret persuasion society that builds and deploys words as
weapons. The people who wield these words are known as poets;
the story centers around a young woman who is recruited
into their ranks, and the man she falls in love with. Which
you are not allowed to do, as a poet. I could explain why,
but I’m not going to. Just trust me.

I began writing this book about five years ago, although it has changed so radically
from my early sketches that I may just go back and write a second,
completely different book from the same original idea. Usually, I
start a novel with a particular situation in mind, but this time
I had a concept, and unfortunately a concept is not a story. A concept is
somewhere for a story to live. So I ended up writing a lot of words,
looking for the story inside this concept. I always take a
kind of sick pride in the number of words that don’t
make it into my final drafts; the notes, doodles, experiments,
deleted scenes, et cetera. I usually have at least as many of
these as published words. This time, I have far more: 197,788.
Actually, that is a little appalling. I hadn’t totaled that
up before. But I’m still proud, because those words led to good ones.

Lexicon will be published by The Penguin Press in
mid-2013 in the US and Canada. Details to come on other countries.